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I began a three-year term as associate editor over at Food Policy at the end of last year, which means that I handle submissions in my areas of expertise, deciding which manuscripts get reviewed and which ones get desk rejected, selecting reviewers for those manuscripts that do get reviewed, and so on.

Once again, I wanted to feature a few articles from the latest issue of the journal. There is nothing special about those articles beyond the fact that I thought they would be of interest to readers of this blog. Those are also regular articles–there is an entire special section of this latest issue dedicated to zero tolerance rules in food safety, which you should check out.

Some of my less visible roles as an academic are that of associate editor at the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and at Food Policy and that of referee for a number of journals in any given year.

I made a list of my 20 rules for refereeing a few years ago; I still stand by most if not all of those rules (as an associate editor, I especially emphasize the first three rules!), and I am planning on writing a post discussing what I have learned from handling manuscripts as an associate editor sometime in the near future. For now, however, I wanted to draw the reader’s attention to three refereeing resources, which my friend and grad-school colleague Gabriel Power passed along a few weeks ago:

Let’s consider the nature of nonindustrial animal agriculture, bringing the same level of scrutiny to those operations that we bring to factory farms. Do this, and two damning realities begin to emerge. Together, they emphasize the consequences of the movement’s failure to follow the logic of its own findings and to promote, as it should, the end of animal agriculture as a revolutionary path to agrarian reform, one with the potential to meet the movement’s most passionately articulated goals.

Continue readingThe Fuzzy Ethics of “Humane Meat”